The Four Corners Of The Sky (3 page)

Going fast had been a habit with her father. But by flying, she could go even faster. On her first ride in the
King of the Sky
, Annie yelled suddenly and long from joy, a noise no one in Emerald had ever heard the somber child make.

“Feel good?” D. K. Destin asked her. “Want to fly it solo someday?”

She nodded yes, with her solemn blue eyes. “Fast,” she repeated.

“The faster the better,” he agreed. “That’s my philosophy. And I can’t even get out of this chair.” When a Vietcong MiG had winged his A-6E Intruder attack bomber on a deep-strike mission, D. K. had crashed into the China Sea where he had held his unconscious navigator up out of the waves on a fragment of wreckage for five and a half hours, longer than he would have needed to (according to him) had anybody “given a fuck about us.” After rescue, emergency surgery on the carrier saved the navigator but left D. K. unable to walk.

After a few dozen hours in the air together, the old combat flyer told her that she was, like him, born to fly. He made her kiss the black eagle painted on the fuselage of his Cropduster and although she was embarrassed, she did so to pledge her allegiance to aviation. Two years later D. K. proclaimed that for her sake he was cutting back on beer. He wanted to live long enough to see her an Annapolis graduate and a commissioned pilot. Annie was going to be Lt. D. K. Destin’s final mission for the U.S. Navy. “Baby, you gonna wave at eagles. You’ll say, ‘’Scuse me, cloud, y’all move on over, here comes the best in the north, south, east, west, and headed for the Milky Way.’ And here’s what you’ll tell the whole fuckin’ world: ‘I am Annie P. Goode and I am
Goode
to go!’”

It was vaguely evident to Annie, flying high with D. K. above the farms of Emerald, that he was training her to be his victory over a smashed career. After she’d won her first flying competition, he’d made this goal explicit, asking her to take a sacred vow on her gold medal, swearing that someday she would show the U.S. Navy how D. K. Destin, a black man with Occaneechi blood, a man the military had used as a scratch pad, could make her a flyer who was faster than anybody else in America. Annie would be D. K.’s proof that this country’s passing him over for the Medal of Honor had been “racist malefaction.”

“For a little bitty white girl,” he noted with satisfaction, “you are fuckin’ good.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to talk like that,” she primly advised him.

“Talk? Don’t get hung up on ‘talk.’ They shoot you out of the sky? Your plane’s on fire and you’re falling in the shit faster’n a wino off an overpass? You’re going down, the China Sea’s rising up, and a lot of water’s saying, ‘Hellowww, baby!’ You know what, Annie? You don’t give a flying fuck how you’re supposed to talk.”

As the years in Emerald went by, Annie proved just how fast she was. She proved it on the ground as well as in the air. Her junior year in high school, she won blue ribbons in hundred-yard dashes. More and more ribbons hung from hooks on the walls of her room. She told a classmate who was urging her to join the cheerleading squad, “I don’t want to cheer somebody else on. I want somebody else to cheer me on.” By her senior year, the Emerald High band was doing just that, playing “Annie P. Goode” at track meets, scored to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” As soon as she walked onto the field toward the starting block, they would start playing:

Go, Annie, go, go, go!

Annie P. Goode!

D. K. Destin dreaded every one of those track meets. He had nightmares that Annie would trip or that someone would knock into her, that she’d suffer some disabling injury (like his own) that would ruin her chance to be accepted at Annapolis where she would learn to fly jets.

His other nightmare was that her father would return out of the blue and take her away.

But Jack Peregrine never returned and Annie never was injured. In fact, ironically, her success in track was one of the reasons so many colleges, including the Naval Academy, wanted to recruit her.

By the time Annie was twenty-one, she was flying faster and higher than D. K. had ever gone, for by that time she was piloting F-14 Tomcats and then F/A-18 Super Hornets straight up into clouds at an acceleration fast enough to make her bones shake. Her white Navy helmet was stenciled “Lt. Annie P. Goode,” with D. K.’s logo of a black eagle under it, and her white jacket was decorated with commendation ribbons. The only midshipman at the Academy who could fly faster than Annie was the midshipman she married. Brad Hopper.

From the start, D. K. didn’t like Brad. When Annie announced she was marrying her classmate, D. K. bluntly asked her, “He can go fast but can he go slow? If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss.”

“Don’t be gross,” Annie told the old flyer.

“Baby, that’s the last of your worries,” he rightly predicted.

Clark also had his doubts about the marriage. Only her optimistic aunt Sam kept saying, “Brad’s the One.”

He wasn’t.

Now, legally separated from him, Annie lived alone and taught flying, mostly to men, some of them men like Brad Hopper. She taught them to fly combat jets off carriers for Air Wing Three of the U.S. Navy. A few of her students afterwards sent her emails from Key West or Jeddah or Fujairah, telling their news or congratulating her on promotions or commendations. Their emails quoted back to her the blessing with which she’d sent each of them on a first solo flight. It was what D. K. had yelled at her morning after morning: “You’re Goode to go!”

Annie’s passion for velocity was a trait she knew she had inherited not from D. K. nor from Clark or Sam, but from Jack Peregrine. “We fly through the air,” he had sung to her at bedtime. “Jump, Annie!” And she would fly off the bed into his embrace; he would hold her tightly by her small forearms, swinging her around in a skipping circle until, dizzy, she would sail off, landing back on the bed, scared but laughing. “You’re a flyer,” he’d say, placing the too-large pink baseball cap on her head like a crown. “You’re off to see the gizzards of the wonderful wizard of Nod.”

“It’s not Nod, Dad, it’s Oz!”

“For the love of Mike, is it? Well, I’m the wizard of Nod, darlin’, and I’m going to make you the Queen of the World.”

Decades later, as an adult, she found herself humming, “Wonderful wizard of Nod,” when she climbed into bed. Long after her father was out of her life, she could still hear his voice singing. He would sing with the radio or the television; when he heard Latin music, he’d pull her into a dance. “Come on, one, two, cha-cha-cha.” And they would dance around the motel room and he would promise, “I’m going to leave you a million dollars. You’ll be the richest queen in the whole wide world.”

The word “leave” always frightened her. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

But, just like a wizard, her father
had
gone away, taking his smile and his stories with him. And so, of all the tales he’d told her, she had come to believe that not one of them was true.

The story of “The Queen of the Sea” was one of his most elaborate tales. He’d added to it for years, working out its details, changing it this way or that as they’d crisscrossed the big country together on long, wide, unending highways.

He told her that a long time ago, caravans of mules, roped together fifty by fifty, lurched over the mountains of Panama, weighed down with silver from the Potosi mines, with Peruvian gold, with emeralds.

When the mules reached the port of Nombre de Dios, a fleet of Spanish galleons with empty hulls was waiting for them. Crews of slaves loaded the ships with treasure and they set sail on the Carrera de las Indias, around the Cabo, their sailors keeping watch for the high bluffs of the Havana Harbor, where they could safely drop anchor before the long voyage to Spain. Many ships never even reached the open Atlantic but sank with their cargo near Cuba. Over the centuries, hundreds of ships sank. Indeed, by the time of Fidel Castro, the Cuban government was estimating that in their territorial waters lay a hundred billion dollars worth of sunken treasure from these ships. They said that all the spoils, collected or not, belonged to the Cuban people. Their researchers were particularly interested in a sunken ship called
La Madre del Salvador.

Her father said that
La Madre
was a Spanish vessel that in 1549 a sudden storm had blown up against the reefs near Havana. It sank, bilging tons of gold and silver ballast onto the floor of the sea. A nobleman on board
,
Don Carlos de Tormes, drowned while removing a statue from a small trunk in his cabin, a wood trunk covered in ornate leather and clasped with ornate iron. In the trunk was a gold effigy so precious that Don Carlos had written home about it in a letter still preserved in a museum in Seville. He called it
La Reina Coronada del Mar
, the Queen of the Sea. It was a reliquary, fifteen-inches high, of the Virgin Mary, crusted with gold and jewels that a year previously had belonged to Inca priests. The priests had handed over the temple treasure to a small squadron of Spanish soldiers who had hacked to death randomly selected members of the Inca community and then expressed their perfect willingness to butcher everyone else. Gold seemed to calm the Spanish down.

A skilled goldsmith fashioned the statue of Mary out of the plunder. He dressed her in the style of the Peruvian earth mother Pachamama and beat out a broad golden cape, studding it with little rubies and sapphires and diamonds. He made her a gold crown, capping it with seven large emeralds, sixty carats apiece, each on a gold rod that formed a sunburst. In the Virgin’s arms was a small silver baby who wore a crown of silver thorns. On her breast a little silver door opened into her heart cavity. Her heart was a 135-carat star ruby, resting on a tiny box that held, allegedly, a real thorn from Christ’s crucifixion crown, with supposedly his real blood on it.

As Annie’s father told the story, when
La Madre del Salvador
sank, everyone aboard drowned, including Don Carlos, who died clutching the Queen of the Sea. For centuries the Queen slept in his skeletal arms, floating slowly along the dark coral reefs among rusted anchors and broken olive jars and bits of majolica bowls, all part of the wreckage of more than five hundred other Spanish ships that had spilled their spoils along the silver route. Time rolled on, nudging the statue loose from the proud nobleman’s bony hands, until finally its crown snagged on a spar near the Colorados Reef. Then one day, a fisherman, diving to untangle his net from the reef, saw a gleam of gold only ten feet below the surface. Diving deep to the shimmer, he freed
La Reina Coronada del Mar
and took her home.

Jack told Annie how in 1815 this devout fisherman had donated the Queen of the Sea to a monastery in his remote village. Afterwards, for decades, rumors spread in that part of Cuba about a relic recovered from the reefs. But eventually the stories muddled into idle chitchat until finally only a few old people had ever even heard of the statue.

In 1898 a war had started in Cuba called the Spanish-American War. The U.S. Army invaded the island to free people like the fisherman and they bombed the monastery. Annie’s father told her how an American armament officer, searching for survivors in that monastery, found in its rubble the jeweled statue of the Virgin Mary and took it home with him to North Carolina. This officer’s name was Joseph Peregrine.

Once home, Peregrine rebuilt the house and called it Pilgrim’s Rest. In 1900 he changed the name of the whole town from Aquene (its Occaneechi name) to Emerald. Because he was the richest man around, no one objected. Everyone called Captain Peregrine “Boss” and he bossed everyone in his family and in Emerald until somebody killed him. Before his sudden death, Boss had taken all the jewels out of the statue and buried them at Pilgrim’s Rest where nobody could find them, until generations later his great-grandson Jack did just that. Or so Annie’s father told her.

When a child, riding along the highways, Annie did not understand most of the details of what her father said about
La Reina Coronada del Mar
. But it was a story she liked to hear. It was a story about a mother, even if only a gold one fifteen inches high; a mother who was lost for a long time and then miraculously found. Back then Annie still hoped to find her own mother some day. She’d always thought that she would suddenly pick her mother out of a crowd, maybe by spotting and identifying her with her special neon-blue X-ray sunglasses, although her mother and she had never met, although her father had made up a different, unbelievable story every time she’d asked him who her mother was.

In her first year at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie started having a recurring dream in which she confused the Queen of the Sea with her unknown mother. She had this dream so often that her aunt and uncle began to call it “Annie’s dream.” Still asleep, she cried out and they hurried to her room and told her it was just a dream. But she knew that and it didn’t help.

In this dream, she was flying a little red airplane over a blue ocean. The colors were uncomplicated, like colors in a crayon box. Red, blue, yellow. Water and sky were the same bright crayon-blue so that there was no way to know air from ocean except for a black line between them. Flying beside her was her father, also in a red airplane. Their planes looked like a children’s ride at an amusement park.

As Annie’s plane floated out of clouds, she saw a small wooden ship, a Spanish ship with square sails, sailing precariously through the ocean. At the prow of this ship stood a young woman, whom Annie knew to be her mother. The woman had red-gold hair. She wore a gold cape like the Queen of the Sea. Her ship was sinking and she was shouting for help.

Annie flew back up to her father’s plane, shouting for him to do something. But he sped far ahead until he was only a fleck of red on the blue horizon. She couldn’t keep up with him. So she turned back to try to help her mother. But she was not in time. Waves swept over the ship and her mother disappeared beneath the sea.

And that’s when Annie woke up.

The first adult to whom Annie told the details of this dream was neither Sam nor Clark but her flying teacher, D. K. Destin. She told D. K. one day when he was maneuvering them in and out of white clouds high above Emerald; the sky looked so much like the sky in her dream that she began talking about it. She told him about the woman on the ship that she couldn’t save. She explained about the golden statue of the Queen of the Sea in her father’s story and she told him as many details as she could remember.